Here's a quick video from last week's International Symposium on Wearable Computers.

When geeks first started wearing computers 20 years ago, fitness was not their first concern. Lugging a twenty-pound 80's-vintage Compaq around might have contributed to fitness, but that wasn't the first goal. Time marches on. This first computer shown is a fitness monitor. I'm sure that healthy people will choose to use these devices, but systems like this will quickly find their way into medicine too. This system would allow a cardiologist to monitor a heart patient outside the clinic to make sure that she is doing well - that she is neither being lazy or overdoing it in recovery. Just make those monitors a little smaller please.

Given just a little refinement (hide the wires) I think that glove control for an iPod would sell to the active college-age crowd.

I'm was not as impressed with the last wearable computer. Greg Priest-Dorman is an important pioneer in this field and he's obviously worked hard over many years perfecting a system that helps him overcome his disabilities. But this device wouldn't sell to a large market. It looks, asthetically, very much like the wearable computers that geeks were experimenting with 20 years ago. It's time for wearable computer monitors to look like a normal pair of glasses. The keyboard needs to be, at most, a simple glove. The CPU should be the size of a PDA. And there should be no wires anywhere - bluetooth the whole system.

Internet connectivity is the reason that people would consider a wearable computer. Reliable mobile broadband has to be part of the deal.